YouSaid · the spoken record

Nancy Sherman

lines on the record: 71
first: 2021-12-14
most recent: 2021-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“just have to calm ourselves down right we know that we know that some of the sped up emotions really result from our ticking too fast and we need to cool down the autonomic system a little bit”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moral Enhancement Drugs, and they'll go in for bioenhancement that closes the gap between cold cognition and hot emotion, so that we can really bring in line what it means to kill that many people with that drone strike. You may be able to say it in your head, but do you really know what that feels like? So we have to visualize and imagine in order to give meaning to the emotional empowerment. And sometimes it's not really just discourse, I think, or just words. They're the beginning psychotherapists, as I say. In the tradition of any kind of Freudian or whoever follows Freud, words, chatting, putting words to your thought helps to do some chimney sweeping. But we may also...”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you put words on your thought and you actually articulate them a bit and you drill that articulation into your head, they have actual practices. They're not just meditate at the end of the day, but think in advance, pre-rehearse some of the bad things that could happen to you during this day. And that will get you set up for it. So they're very much about emotions get their power by having words attached to them, by being discursive, by being thought that is articulated. We know there's a gap between what you think and say and what you actually do. There's not a perfect go-to there at all. And some of my more radical colleagues in philosophy might say, you know, we need.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I got a little bit too angry at the doorman at the building who didn't recognize me and didn't let me in. Very pedestrian kind of response. I wasn't seated at the head table, at the banquet where all the dignitaries were. I thought I should be Well, maybe I'm a little too puffed up about that So the pause is sometimes built in in reflective moments and that is what psychotherapy is about and they called themselves therapists of the psyche the Greek word is Therapea of the soul or the psyche but it's it's themselves with themselves whether in letter writing or these meditations they're called meditations they're very discursive it's not like Eastern meditation”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the way they think about it is pretty graphic. They're thinking that you have some time. Now we know we don't always have time, but they're reconstructing it as if you have time. So you get this charged impulse that comes in. He's insulting me, you know, and then you get hot and heavy. I'm going to get pissed off. I'm going to get angry. So they think that you can monitor your impression. We call it an observing ego. You watch yourself a little bit. You watch how you're reacting or responding to the impulse or to that affront. And they even have ways of doing it. They're not going to sit you down in a therapist's office. They are going to tell you at the end of the day to do some journaling. This is what Seneca says, you know, the night's quiet, my wife is asleep, she knows my habits. That's exactly what he says. And he says,”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Healthy aversion to threat, you have a healthy approach to things that you want, and you have a healthy, well, they also give you one for joy, a healthy pleasure that's maybe, you know, this is their word rational exuberance, but you get the idea. It's actually our word for charity. The Greek word is and it turns into charity. So it's a kind of charitable disposition of pleasurableness that comes along with doing things. So they're all calm, equable, serene kinds of emotions. Do we get there? Most of us, not fully. Should we aspire to get there? Yeah. And so that third layer is the one that you kind of want to keep in mind as you try. Stems some of the more debilitating emotions that are hard to manage, for instance.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're reacting a bit, but your reaction is filtered through your reason. And it slowed down a little bit. You've had a chance to sort of press the pause button a bit. I mean, you may not get fully there. This is some ideal way, but this is what you're after. You're kind of trying to slow down the response so that what you now come to think is the right way to react and the right way to see that thing outside that so bruised your ego before isn't necessarily as an insult. You know, maybe the person was deluded. Maybe move on. Don't get pissed off by it or something of that sort. I think of it as you're not stuck on the object of anger. You're not stuck on the object of desire. You're not stuck on the threat out there. You have a kind of...”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're into the third layer, absolutely Shane. In this third layer is a kind of rational desire. So you're not going after something with sticky acquisitiveness or kind of sticky attachment.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guy was out to hurt me and I'm going to be angry at him. And your response to that ego bruise is I'm going to fight back in some way. So these are all the emotions that if you let them run them up, they can derail you. Now the Stoics are developmentalists. So in this regard, again, they're really forward-thinking. They're into moral development of the emotions because that's where they think you really can, if you recalibrate your values, it has to be also with your emotions lining up to what you believe to be the right values. So they think you should start trying to cultivate a good kind of fear. And they actually have a name for it, which is cautiousness. They think you should start cultivating a good kind. Of desire and they give it a name”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anger and fear. Full-throated anger and fear, and resentment and revenge, and also grief that won't go away, you know, sort of the depression, we would might call it chronic grief these days, we might call it chronic grief syndromes, that just won't go away. So you endorse those first fleeting impulses that have come in from the body talking, and you run with them. And you run with them in a way where you can't stop. Fear, desire, pleasure, distress. And under those four, everything falls essentially. And they get the body going as well as the mind. And essentially, and they're essentially belief theorists about emotion, so they're cognitivists, which means it's not only an impulse that you give rise to, but it's a kind of belief.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sometimes say, or autonomic arousals. They have so many descriptions of them. They're really prescient in this regard. They're very forward-thinking. The next step are ones that can get you into trouble. This is the second layer. And these are the ones many of us feel. So the way Seneca puts it, so he's now, we're talking now a Roman statesman and writer and spin doctor, speechwriter for Nero. He essentially says that you can overstep reason a little bit. You can once started, these are hard to stop. And so they're as if they're the proto-emotions that you give assent to. That's their word. You endorse them.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have emotional skin in the game, as I say in these three ways. One is that you have these pre-emotions or proto-emotions. You know, you starts and startles. You hear a loud sound and your body jumps a little bit or Seneca gives these great examples. If you're general, you could be the bravest, most stoic general, but your knees knock a little bit when you hear the clarion call to start marching. Or you turn green if you're in a shipwreck, you know, even if you're a sage. Your body's talking. Maybe not your mind. It's your body talking. And you can feel all those, and they're probably very adaptive. Someone like Joseph Ledoux, who's a neurobiologist at NYU and studies all the different levels of the brain, you know, refers to that as the sort of the low road emotions, the amygdala, the limbic system.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Stoicism came to have a little S in a way that really you don't see with many philosophies. I don't know. We don't talk about Aristotle with a little S or maybe Platonic. So with Stoic, the one that has come to us is kind of almost through the British stiff upper lip. Passionless, maybe the monarchy best reflects it. You saw it in all the British tabloids when Prince Philip died. Was the Queen Stoic enough? That kind of is one strand of Stoicism, which is try to manage your debilitating emotions. But it's not the only because if you really read more deeply, the Stoics with a big S have the most sophisticated emotion theory there is in the ancient world. There are three levels at least of emotions.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was what I was being asked to do. So the Stoicism I often think about really rooted in text because my background's in ancient philosophy is what kinds of lessons can the Stoics give us that aren't the ones often characterized, like go it alone. A solution for the military? I mean, after all, a military is a cadre. And it wasn't in all of the texts. In fact, a very, very prominent theme in Stoicism is that we are coordinated, we're connected, and we live in a cosmos that makes us cosmopolitan citizens of the universe, a global world.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was essentially the blessings and curses of being stoic. I wanted to promote a gentler stoicism than one I was seeing in the military. Fast forward, twenty years later we're in two at the time were endless wars. My students at Georgetown are returning from war many Marines getting their first degrees and I ended up being consulted a lot by the Pentagon and by pretty senior military officers and I ended up sitting on some suicide review boards as an observer but very high level pentagon events bringing the whole world into one room about suicides on their watch and I just thought the last thing I really want to be promoting is suck it up and truck on. I've often worked on the emotions and I really wanted to destigmatize mental health for the military.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The USS Ticonderoga. And then the moment happened, 1965. He shot down. And he says as he's parachuting very famously, five years down there at least, I'm leaving the world of technology behind and entering the world of Epictetus. So this memorized pithy wisdom, very accessible pithy wisdom about control really was his command, self-command, you might say, for all those years. And I interviewed Stockdale very late in his life, you know, and he could kind of still memorize this little booklet by heart. It was quite remarkable to me. He really had internalized it. So all this resonated with me. And I had to think which Stoic lessons are really the ones I want to endorse or promote. And that resulted in a book, Stoic Warriors.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And officers, many of whom were my age they had fought in Vietnam. And they also knew about Stoicism, their own version. They knew about what they called suck it up and truck on. Less elegant, embrace the suck, and this was stoicism for them, and it could have a small S or a big S, but it essentially was deal with deprivation. And one of their own, whom I came to interview several times in connection with my work, was a guy named Jim Stockdale, or James Bond Stockdale. And he was the senior POW in the Hanoi-Hilton or the North Vietnamese Prisoner of War Camp that held American service member prison nurse. John McCain was there with him. Stockdale had happened, stumbled on this little book by Epictetus called The Handbook that he was Stockdale was given. You know, he memorized it on those long nights that you're on on a carrier.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a rather interesting story. Sometime several decades ago, I found myself being called up by the Naval Academy and essentially the superintendent and the commandant there in Annapolis. I don't live too far from Annapolis, Maryland. And they had this massive cheating scandal. I mean, these happen every so often, but this one was a big compromise of what was called an electrical engineering, doubly exam. We're under the glare of Washington, D.C. And it was a tough time for the Navy to begin with. So they called me and Anne said, do you ever teach ethics? Well, I've been teaching ethics for a long time. Well, do you think you could put together an ethics course for us in a week, which is what I did? And I ended up staying there for almost three years, essentially on secondment from George.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I learned a lot about pressing levers and getting the pleasure center excited with pellets of food and whatnot, essentially stimulus and reinforcement. Skinner was really in vogue at the time. BF Skinner. And I thought, this is really not what I signed up for. But I ended up in philosophy and I haven't turned back since. So it was sort of a process of elimination. And there you have it. One thing led to another.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that begins a long time ago. So I think I probably was in high school and I found myself thinking about going to college, which was extremely exciting for me. And I thought, what am I going to study? Well, what I really want to do is learn about human beings, what makes a human being. I get to Brynmar and lo and behold, the course I think that's going to do it is anthropology, but anthropology is physical anthropology. That means the professor rolled in with bones and fossils. And then I took a psychology course and I was sort of almost on my way to becoming a psychology major, but we were very influenced at the time by behaviorism and by essentially running rats. And I had a very lovely one whom I named Absalom. I was reading Faulkner at the time.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is very hard in a world driven by how many likes you have on a Facebook page or how many followers you have to remember that these metrics are not really your measure of your worth. It's not that. It's what's inside and that's your virtue. And it will have its own kind of honor. It's the honor befitting virtue. And that really is that's an incredibly important lesson right now.”
2021-12-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT